Asteroid named for academician

Late paleoanthropologist renowned for his extensive research on Peking Man

An asteroid has been named after Wu Rukang, arguably China's most important paleoanthropologist, to commemorate his academic contributions to Chinese physical anthropology and paleoanthropology studies.

The naming ceremony took place on Monday, exactly 14 years after Wu died, at the Zhoukoudian Peking Man Museum in Beijing where Wu did extensive research on Peking Man fossils. His body is buried at the Zhoukoudian Peking Man heritage site.

Wu, who was also an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, was born in Jiangsu province in 1916 and died in Beijing in 2006. From 1946 to 1949, he studied anatomy in the United States at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri and received his doctorate in 1949. He returned to China that year and continued his research at the academy's Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in 1953.